Dagbani is the mother tongue of ca. 500.000 speakers in Northern Ghana
and among emigrants in the south and in neighbouring countries of Ghana.
It is one of the languages officially recognized by the Ghanaian government,
thus it is also taught in schools. The illiteracy rate among the Dagbani
speakers though is still very high.

The present introduction to the phonology is the first part of a research
project intending to describe the grammar of Dagbani. One could easily
deal only with the phonological system of a language for years, therefore
this article cannot be considered to be "complete". Its aim is
to point out the most important and interesting features of a language
which has not been analyzed in detail so far. There is a small number of
linguists (and also non-linguists) who have dealt with Dagbani in the past.
R. Fisch (1912) tried to describe the main grammatical features of the
language, and his work written in German early this century is certainly
the first published material on Dagbani. One of the next to work intensively
with it was W.A.A. Wilson in the 1960's and the following years. Many of
my preliminary ideas about the phonological (and further grammatical) structure
of Dagbani are based on his Introductory course and other materials
he put at my disposal. - The most recent research on Dagbani I found is
by Larry Hyman who collected some phonological data a few years ago and
made interesting findings for modern linguistics, especially regarding
the tonal system of Dagbani (see Hyman, 1988, 1993). - Beside the existing
literature, personal contacts with André Wilson and John Bendor-Samuel
were useful for the preparation of a fieldtrip undertaken in July 1994.
Within 5 weeks, a large data corpus concentrating on phonetic and phonological
questions was recorded and later analyzed in the Phonetiklabor (Heinrich-Heine-Universität
Düsseldorf) with the help of Ralf Skischally and Karl-Heinz Bockers.
During a second trip in 1995, the results were modified and extended. -
In Tamale the research wouldn't have been possible without the help of
my patient helpers, Moses Seidu and Memunatu Sayibu Musah and the kind
support by the Dagbani Literacy Project, a branch of GILLBT (Ghana
Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation). Thanks also
to my friend Wolfgang Tiedeck in Tamale, who helped in many practical matters,
to Prof. Greenstreet, Prof. Dolphyne and Mr. M. Sulley at the University
of Ghana, Legon, and to Richard Wiese and Chris Golston (both Heinrich-Heine-Universität
Düsseldorf). Special thanks also to Tony Naden for crosschecking
and contributing a number of ideas to this article.

The findings of the fieldtrips mentioned were essential for the analysis
presented here though a number of questions remain which require further
research.

1. Introduction

The Dagbani language can be divided into two main dialects: the eastern
one which is spoken around the traditional capital of DagbaN (Dagomba
land), Yendi, and the western dialect spread in the Tamale area. - Regarding
the technical terms for the language and its speakers, there is some confusion:
the name Dagbani is used by English speakers, the speakers are called
Dagomba(s) within Ghana. The indigenious name for the language is
Dagbanli, the people call themselves Dagbamba (sg. Dagbana).
- Dagbani belongs to the Western-Oti-Volta branch of the Gur languages,
being a group of the large Niger-Congo language family. Within the francophone
world, Gur languages are also known as Voltaic languages.
Adams Bodomo, a Ghanaian linguist, introduced the expression Mabia languages
as an indigenous classificatory term. It is built out of lexical items
as <ma> (mother) and <bia> (child) and denotes a sibling relationship
between languages such as Dagbani, Mampruli, Dagaari and Kusaal. Mabia
is meant to replace such terms as Western Oti-Volta, as a subgroup of Gur
(Bodomo, 1994).

Dagbani is a written language. The New Testament was published in the
1980's (as a revision of some gospel samples of the sixties) and the orthographic
standard used there was adopted for a certain period. In the last years
though a number of writing conventions were abandoned, due to the lack
of cooperation between the various publishers of texts. As this has led
to inconsistent and non-standardized writings, the conventions used in
the NT will be adopted in the present paper. Every example in this article
is given as a sequence of three forms using different kinds of brackets:

<orthographic writing> [IPA] (English
translation)

Where an interlinear translation was necessary, this was indicated by
quotation marks ("..."), giving the "literal" meaning.

Regarding the phonetic form of utterances, I decided not to insist on
a "narrow" transcription in cases in which it did not seem crucial.
Thus, optional features like palatalization, labialization or allophonic
variants are not considered in the transcription when this was not relevant,
as that would have had a confusing influence on the questions in discussion.

- Like the other Gur languages (and Niger-Congo languages in general),
Dagbani is a tone language.

One interesting aspect is the overlapping of phonology and morphology,
or: how prosodic features like tone operate on the morphological level.
The interaction between phonology and syntax is another task which is worthy
to be analyzed. - The difficulty that arises in an article on phonology
is, of course, where to restrict the "phonological" description,
as half of it might be pure morphology or syntax. Therefore in the chapter
about suprasegmental phonology, the information about tonal influences
on other components of the grammar is reduced to a minimum; instead the
main emphasis is placed on some aspects of the tonal behaviour on the word
level. I hope to fill this gap in later descriptions.